Living a digital life with empty pockets

Today, I’ve been messing around in Openlife, which is a new virtual world very much akin to the one we all know so well, and which uses the open source OpenSim code. I re-created Mar’s presence over there, right down to the same surname (which, given that you can create any name on Openlife (which I’m going to abbreviate to OL for now) might be a bit surprising, but I’d like to keep her the same, no matter where she goes.

OK, so what’s it like? Well… it’s different. Still very much in alpha phase, a lot of things don’t yet work. For example, you can forget about any prim attachments, because they won’t attach! (I can hear you all running away, screaming from here, y’know…). So no pretty prim hair and no poufy prim skirts. (Hey, at least the system skirts don’t vanish on OL…) Edit 1: Updates are apparently on the way for this, as well as for many other things. OL is a very fluid beast at the moment: constantly evolving! Edit 2: Attachments now work – yay! OMG, I can have hair! *g*

So yep. You’re down to that horrible ‘grown’ hair, and making your own clothes. There’s no money (well, there is: you start out with 10,000 of their currency, but you can’t spend it. Even texture uploads (which say they cost 5) cost you nothing. There are no stores, no freebies, nothing like that. Edit 3: Money now seems to be working. A few texture uploads started taking money from my 10,000.

You know what, though? I find that rather refreshing. Today I broke out Chip Midnight’s clothing templates that I downloaded ages ago, and actually used them to make a t-shirt and pair of long socks for Mar. I then downloaded Eloh Eliot’s full ‘Another Skin’ .psd files and fiddled around with them for ages until I had a set I could upload, to get Mar looking nice. (According to the comments on Eloh’s post there, the skins are part of the OL library, but I wanted to get to know my way around them anyway.) I logged Mar into Second Life, grabbed all the measurements from her full-perm shape, then transferred them to a new shape in OL. And yes, I even fussed with that horrible grown hair and managed to get it looking halfway decent.

Sometimes, being in Second Life, we get a bit lazy. Freebies everywhere, and no effort needed by ourselves to look great. This is new, and it’s fun. I feel a bit like a kid in a sandbox, playing with new toys. It’s rather fun, being a newbie all over again.

About

About SL for Nowt

So what is SL for Nowt all about? (Hey, that rhymed…)

Initially, I wanted to see if it was possible to create an entirely new avatar in the Second Life world, without putting in any money of my own. I planned to do this by picking money from money trees only. No camping (sitting on chairs/mopping floors/doing other activities that make an area look busy, in return for small amounts of cash), and definitely no begging! I set myself the goal of a minimum 50L$ per day from the money trees, and met this target on most days. I even exceeded it a lot on a few days. Along the way, I spotted (and screencaptured) many odd things, met some interesting people, got annoyed at the rudeness of ’some people’ and generally had a fun time.

The blog has now taken a different path, since my original goals have now been met. Now, SL for Nowt is all about finding freebies and cheapies, living a virtual existence in the Second Life world on the cheap, and helping out newbies as much as possible.

SL for Nowt has moved away from WordPress hosting, as I was unhappy with WordPress inserting ads into my content that I had no control over. It’s now self-hosted, so please hop over and pay a visit to the new blog!

Disclaimer

SL for Nowt is an entirely unofficial blogsite, and is not endorsed by Linden Research, Inc.